# Bears Turn Up on Lists About Oscars, Art Auctions and the NFL
> Fat Bear Week votes on one measurement. Fourteen other rankings put the bear against film, toys, flags, football and a Leonardo drawing.
*By YPB Team · Published September 20, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/bear-ranked-many-ways*
---
Brooks Falls, Katmai National Park. Photo: NPS/Michael Fitz, public domain.
On 22 September the National Park Service opens voting in Fat Bear Week, a knockout bracket in which the public picks the fattest brown bear at Katmai National Park. Last year's edition drew more than 1,700,000 votes from over a hundred countries, and Bear 32, known as Chunk, won it.1 The animal being voted on has spent the summer eating up to forty salmon a day and putting on around four pounds of body weight a day.2
That is one bear, judged on one measurement. The rest of the internet cannot agree on what a bear is for.
> No other animal has escaped its own biology so completely: the bear appears on more lists about films, toys and football than about wildlife.
## Grizzly vs Polar Bear: eight species, six in trouble
There are eight living species of bear, and the ranking below puts all of them in the same field.
The two most people picture are the brown bear, which in North America is called the grizzly, and the polar bear, the largest land carnivore on earth. A large male brown bear enters the feeding season somewhere between 600 and 900 pounds and can pass a thousand by late September.2
The other six are stranger and less famous. The sun bear of Southeast Asia is small enough to climb for honey. The sloth bear vacuums termites through a gap in its front teeth. The giant panda gave up meat for bamboo and kept the digestive system of a carnivore.
Six of the eight are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN; only the brown bear and the American black bear are listed Least Concern.3 The ranking is a popularity contest between eight animals, six of which are losing a far bigger one.
Eight species, and the whole field is bear. Play it →
## Katmai vs Yellowstone: where the bears actually are
Katmai National Park exists on most people's mental map only because of its bears. The Brooks Falls webcams run all summer, and the Fat Bear Week bracket is decided there.1
Yellowstone is the park that gets the visitors. It holds bison, elk, wolves and grizzlies inside one caldera, and it is the only place in the lower 48 where the 1995 wolf reintroduction can be watched from a road.
Other parks are not short of animals either. Denali has caribou and Dall sheep on a single park road, the Everglades is the only place alligators and crocodiles share a habitat, and the Great Smoky Mountains hold the densest black bear population of any US park.
Katmai's case is narrow and very strong. It is the park where an animal is the entire attraction.
The park the bears made famous, against the one that has everything else. Play it →
## The 1985 Chicago Bears: the roster everyone still names
Here the bear is a football team. George Halas renamed the Decatur Staleys in 1922, reasoning that if the city's baseball club were Cubs, a football team should be something bigger.4
The 1985 team went 15–1 and won Super Bowl XX. Five of its players and coaches are enshrined in Canton, including Walter Payton, Mike Ditka, Mike Singletary, Richard Dent and Dan Hampton.
Its competition on this list is every other great NFL side: the undefeated 1972 Dolphins, Lombardi's 1962 Packers, the 1978 Steelers, the 2007 Patriots.
Very few of those teams are remembered for a novelty single. The Bears recorded the "Super Bowl Shuffle" before they had won anything.
The 1985 Bears against Lombardi's Packers. Play it →
## Chicago vs Cleveland: the most Hall of Famers, the fewest trophies
The same animal, the same city, and a list it would rather not be on.
The Chicago Bears hold the NFL record for the most enshrinees in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the most retired jersey numbers. They have won nine league championships. Exactly one of them is a Super Bowl.4
Cleveland has the cleaner claim to the top of this ranking: four pre-merger NFL titles and no Super Bowl appearance at all since the merger. Minnesota reached four Super Bowls in eight years and lost every one. Atlanta led Super Bowl LI by 28–3 in the third quarter.
A franchise with that many bronze busts and one trophy is a specific kind of failure, and it belongs to a team named after a bear.
Same badge as the last ranking, opposite question. Play it →
## Theodore Roosevelt's hunting trip is still in the toy aisle
In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a tethered black bear on a Mississippi hunt. A cartoon followed, then a Brooklyn shopkeeper's stuffed toy, then a name that never came off.
The teddy bear is now the default shape of a child's first toy, which is why it belongs in a ranking of stuffed animals rather than a ranking of bears.
Its competition is a century of soft toys with no fur in common: a rag doll patented in 1915, a monkey sewn from a pair of red-heeled work socks, an electronic owl with a vocabulary, and a marshmallow-textured plush that adults collect.
No other soft toy is named after a US president.
A president's hunting trip, still on shelves. Play it →
## Paddington: a ranking where every option is the same bear
Most rankings ask a bear to compete with something else. This one does not.
Michael Bond's bear from Darkest Peru has three live-action films, and the ranking is simply which of them is best. The 2014 original established the duffel coat and the marmalade. The 2017 sequel sent him to prison. The 2024 film took him back to Peru.
A bear carrying a whole ranking on his own is rarer than it sounds. The other lists here all make him share.
Three films, one bear, no other species invited. Play it →
## Fozzie Bear vs Kermit: the one who tells the bad jokes
Jim Henson built the Muppets around a frog. Fozzie Bear is the one standing next to him dying on stage.
Fozzie's entire character is a stand-up comedian whose material does not work, heckled from a balcony by two old men. He is a bear in a hat and a spotted tie, and the joke only lands because he keeps going.
The field is deep: Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Animal, the Swedish Chef, Rowlf. Most of them are funnier than Fozzie on purpose.
The frog who runs the show, against the bear who opens it. Play it →
## Care Bears vs the Turtles: the 1980s toy-aisle war
Two bear franchises made it into the same decade of Saturday-morning cartoons, and both were built to sell merchandise.
Care Bears began as greeting-card characters in 1981 and reached television in 1985, each bear identified by the symbol on its stomach. The Adventures of the Gummi Bears arrived the same year as a Disney series with no toy line behind it.
Neither was designed to beat He-Man, Transformers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which share this list and were engineered for the action-figure aisle rather than the plush one.
Pastel bears against the toy aisle's heaviest hitters. Play it →
## Grizzly Man: Herzog, Treadwell, and the same park as Fat Bear Week
Here the bear stops being a mascot.
Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers living close to the brown bears of Katmai National Park and filming them. On 5 October 2003 he and Amie Huguenard were killed by one. Werner Herzog built the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man out of Treadwell's own footage.5
The park is the same one running the bracket that opens this week. The bears are the same population.
On this list Grizzly Man is up against Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu, films Herzog spent years and reputations making. It is the one where he mostly points a camera at what somebody else already shot.
Herzog's jungle epic against his Alaskan documentary. Play it →
## Half a year in a den, against the Arctic tern
A brown bear can spend up to half the year in a den without eating, drinking or urinating, and comes out having lost roughly a third of its body weight.2
Stated that way it sounds unbeatable. Then the rest of this ranking arrives.
The Arctic tern flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back every year. The bar-tailed godwit crosses the Pacific without landing. The emperor penguin stands through an Antarctic winter balancing an egg on its feet, and the tardigrade survives being boiled, frozen and put in vacuum.
The bear's version is the one a person can imagine doing, which may be exactly why it feels impressive.
Hibernation against the longest migration on earth. Play it →
## The bear's nose against the bloodhound's
The bloodhound is the animal courts have accepted tracking evidence from. The grizzly is the animal that finds a carcass from miles away and is routinely credited with a nose several times sharper.
Neither is the extreme case here. The African elephant carries more olfactory receptor genes than any animal yet sequenced, and a male silkmoth detects a single pheromone molecule on its antennae from far downwind.
Bears mostly use theirs to locate food that other animals have already killed. It is a scavenger's instrument as much as a hunter's, and it works across the open country of a park like Katmai.
The dog that testifies in court, against the bear that smells dinner from miles out. Play it →
## Grizzly vs Great White: two reputations, almost no bodies
The grizzly is the animal American hikers are most afraid of, and it kills a very small number of people a year worldwide.
The great white is the same story with water. Jaws made it the ocean's villain, and unprovoked fatal attacks stay in the single digits most years. The orca is called the killer whale and has never killed a person in the wild.
Not everything on this list is innocent. The hippopotamus is regularly named the most dangerous large animal in Africa and earns it.
A bear that is genuinely dangerous to meet at close range is still nowhere near the top of any honest casualty table, and that gap is the whole point of the ranking.
The unflattering list, and the bear has a real claim to it. Play it →
## California put a grizzly on its flag and then lost the animal
The bear on the California state flag was drawn from a real captive grizzly. The subspecies it belonged to was hunted out, and the last confirmed California grizzly was killed in the 1920s.
The flag stayed. A state now advertises itself with an animal it no longer has.
Berlin and the Swiss canton of Bern both put bears on their arms too, which gives this ranking three of them. They are competing against the Welsh dragon, the Mexican eagle eating a snake, the Bhutanese thunder dragon and an extinct ox on the flag of Moldova.
Heraldry is not fussy about whether the animal still exists.
Three bears in this field, and one of them is extinct. Play it →
## Leonardo da Vinci's bear sold for £8.8 million
The smallest thing in this article is a bear's head about seven centimetres square, drawn in silverpoint by Leonardo da Vinci.
Christie's sold it in London in July 2021 for £8.8 million with fees, on a single bid, setting a record for a Leonardo drawing.6 The Art Newspaper reported the price against an estimate the sale did not reach.
It is filed here with Stubbs's life-size Whistlejacket, Dürer's rhinoceros, the lions painted on the wall of the Chauvet cave more than thirty thousand years ago, and a twelve-metre terrier made of flowers outside the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Animals have been the subject of art for longer than art has had a name for itself. A bear got there early and stayed.
A seven-centimetre Leonardo, against a life-size racehorse. Play it →
## One animal, fourteen job descriptions
A wolf is a wolf on every list it appears on. The bear is a predator, a toy, a football crest, a Muppet, a flag, an Oscar-winning Chilean short film and a Leonardo drawing, and the version you get depends entirely on who is doing the sorting.7
Fourteen rankings, and the animal in the photograph belongs to only about half of them. All fourteen are decided by [the head-to-head method](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison), so the disagreements stay visible instead of averaging into a single score.
Pick a subject that refuses to sit in one category, and make a ranking of it.
## More rankings, more angles
- [The Wolf, Ranked 16 Different Ways](/articles/the-wolf-ranked-many-ways) — the other North American predator, and the one the lists treat consistently
- [The Bald Eagle Steals Fish, Squeaks, and Represents America](/articles/bald-eagle-ranked-many-ways) — a national symbol with an unglamorous day job
- [Dogs vs Cats and the 15 Lists That Split Them](/articles/dogs-vs-cats-ranked) — the pet argument nobody has ever won
Sources
National Park Service, Katmai — Fat Bear Week 2026 dates, format, and last year's vote total and champion: nps.gov (checked 2026-09-20)
Vital Ground Foundation — the science of Fat Bear Week: daily salmon intake, weight gain during hyperphagia, pre-season weights, and weight lost in hibernation: vitalground.org (checked 2026-09-20)
IUCN — "Six out of the world's eight species of bears are threatened with extinction", with the brown bear and American black bear listed Least Concern: iucn.org (checked 2026-09-20)
Chicago Bears franchise history — the 1922 renaming, nine league championships, one Super Bowl, and the Hall of Fame and retired-number records: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-20)
Grizzly Man — Herzog's 2005 documentary, Timothy Treadwell's thirteen summers, and the October 2003 deaths in Katmai: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-20)
The Art Newspaper — Leonardo's Head of a Bear sets a record for the artist's drawings at Christie's, July 2021: theartnewspaper.com (checked 2026-09-20)
Bear Story (Historia de un oso) — the 2016 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, and Chile's first Oscar: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-20)
